Cassandra is only carbon nowMar 15

Everyone has a MacBook Neo take, so here's mine.

Apple has, in my opinion, been a net negative for computing, and to a stunning degree. They've normalized DRM for software so completely that it will possibly take decades to get back the rights that we lost. They've used that power to make life worse for queer folks and to cozy up to the Trump administration.

But. There's something fascinating about the Neo.

Show threadCassandra is only carbon nowMar 15

@glyph made the point that the Neo is an implicit promise from Apple that macOS will run just fine on 8 GB of memory for the next 8 years.

But I think it goes farther than that: Apple made a reference device for application developers. They've never been shy about enforcing requirements on developers, and this is an interesting positive side to that: developers now have a huge incentive to make applications that fit within modest memory limits.

Show threadCassandra is only carbon nowMar 15

Put differently: this is the Electron killer, for better or worse, and not in the way that Apple killed Flash.

When PCs ship with 8 GB or less of RAM, application companies don't give a fuck, and so we get a proliferation of Electron and Electron-like platforms that consume gigantic amounts of RAM. That won't fly on something like the Neo.

Show threadCassandra is only carbon nowMar 15

It was never sustainable to keep acting like there'd always be more RAM, some Moore's Law style kind of truism. AI vendors have forced the issue by engineering an artificial components shortage.

Apple has, to my outsider view as a non-Mac user, thrown down the gauntlet and said that developers *will* stop munching RAM, or else.

Maybe that's not fair, maybe developers shouldn't have to shoulder the burden of OS vendors' failure to build platforms. But users shouldn't bear it either.

Show threada wandering happenstanceMar 15
@xgranade Apple ʜᴀꜱ built a platform⸺one can build complex functionality on top of SwiftUI for a really low net cost in RAM usage (because SwiftUI is all shared code). It’s just not a cross-platform platform. That’s not their problem, though.
Show threadCassandra is only carbon now
@joXn Yeah, it's why I pluralized vendors. Electron sucks, but I can at least target it as a platform much easier than I can target the platforms tied to macOS. Individual vendors may have their own platforms, but as you note, Apple has no interest in making theirs cross-platform platforms.
Mar 15 at 6:35pmWeb
Show threada wandering happenstanceMar 15
@xgranade I _kind of_ like the Diet Electron approach of something like Dioxus, but with Dioxus I think the AI slop exposure risk factor is super-high, making the nominative similarity to “dioxin” bitterly apt.
Show threadCassandra is only carbon nowMar 15
@joXn Tauri is another interesting one along those lines... I think there can be some interesting examples of shipping web view components along with an application, but there has to be some way of making sure that the whole UI isn't running in a full-fledged browser.